CyberGhost review

CyberGhost sells three subscription tiers on a single app. The 1-month plan lists at $12.99 per month and renews monthly with a short 14-day refund window. The 1-year plan drops the effective rate to $4.19 per month, billed once a year. The 2-year plan is the budget play at $2.19 per month billed up front, and the current 2YCOUPON promo adds 4 extra months on top, totalling 28 months of coverage for the price of 24.

Every plan six months or longer is backed by the 45-day money-back window, which is the longest in the consumer VPN market. The 1-month subscription only qualifies for the 14-day refund. If you change your mind inside the first month and a half, cancel through the dashboard and the refund posts within 5 to 10 business days, no support ticket required. Renewal pricing reverts to the standard published rate after the intro term.

CyberGhost is one of the few consumer VPNs that labels individual servers by purpose rather than just by city. Open the desktop or mobile app and the sidebar splits the network into Streaming, Torrenting, and Gaming lists. Pick a streaming server and the app tells you which catalog it is pre-tuned for: Netflix US, Netflix UK, BBC iPlayer, Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video, and so on. Pick a torrenting server and you get a P2P-friendly location with a route optimized for sustained upload.

In practice this saves trial-and-error. If Netflix US stops loading on a generic Chicago exit, switch to the labelled Netflix US server instead of guessing which city still works. The same goes for BBC iPlayer inside the UK, where labelled servers avoid the proxy-error wall that catches untuned VPN IPs. The gaming list picks servers with the lowest ping for a specific multiplayer title, which is the difference between a smooth match and a rubber-banding one.

CyberGhost has been independently audited three times for its no-logs policy, with the most recent assessment by Deloitte in 2024. The audit scope covers the no-logs policy itself (the controls CyberGhost claims to enforce) rather than wire-level packet capture, so the stamp verifies the policy at the documented level. CyberGhost also publishes quarterly transparency reports showing the number of legal requests received and the number rejected.

The company is incorporated in Bucharest, Romania, outside the 14-Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance. Romania is an EU member, but the Romanian Constitutional Court struck down mandatory data-retention laws in 2009, so EU-wide retention mandates do not apply locally. CyberGhost has been owned by Kape Technologies since 2017; some users raise concerns about the Kape ownership history, and CyberGhost points to the audit cadence and transparency reports as the response. If Kape ownership is a hard requirement, the alternatives section lists providers with different corporate parents.

Dedicated streaming servers are tuned for Netflix US, UK, Germany, and Japan, plus BBC iPlayer, Disney+, Prime Video, Hulu, and a handful of regional services. When a streaming provider pushes a block, CyberGhost refreshes the labelled IP pool faster than a generic VPN location would, because the labelled server is a single endpoint to update instead of a country-wide rotation.

The model is not bulletproof. Catalog coverage moves over time and any VPN unblocking Netflix reliably will eventually hit a captcha, a regional licensing change, or a server-IP ban. The dedicated server list shortens those outages because users always have a labelled fallback to try first, rather than a generic city picker. Inside the 45-day refund window, you have more time than any competitor to test the full streaming stack.

CyberGhost operates 9,800+ servers across 100 countries, the largest published fleet of any consumer VPN tracked on VPNPlox. The fleet is upgraded to 10 Gbps in the most popular locations, which is the throughput ceiling that matters for 4K streaming and large downloads. WireGuard, OpenVPN, and IKEv2 are supported on every major platform, plus an automatic kill switch and DNS-leak protection on the desktop and mobile apps.

NoSpy servers are a premium subset of the fleet hosted in CyberGhost's own data centre in Romania, rather than rented third-party infrastructure. NoSpy servers are dedicated to CyberGhost subscribers, which removes the noisy-neighbour risk of shared hosting and gives the operator more control over physical access. They are sold as an add-on to the base subscription and target users who want a tighter hardware chain than the default.

CyberGhost fits three reader profiles. First, streamers who want labelled Netflix, BBC iPlayer, and Disney+ endpoints instead of guessing cities. Second, privacy-minded users outside the 14-Eyes who want three audits and a Romanian jurisdiction, accepting the Kape Technologies ownership question. Third, budget shoppers locking in a 28-month promo at $2.19 per month with a 45-day refund window for the upfront test.

CyberGhost is a weaker fit if you travel to mainland China (no dedicated obfuscation protocol), if you want raw WireGuard throughput in the top tier (NordVPN is faster in our measurements), or if you are uncomfortable with the Kape Technologies parent. Power users who want MultiHop, Tor-over-VPN, or a fully open-source client should look at ProtonVPN or Mullvad instead. None of those gaps are disqualifying, but they are real.

If CyberGhost is close but not quite right, three VPNs cover the same buyer profile with different trade-offs.

• NordVPN - the premium tier. Faster WireGuard speeds (NordLynx), dedicated obfuscated protocol for restrictive networks, and more third-party audits (5 vs 3). Higher monthly price, smaller refund window (30 days vs 45).
• Surfshark - the cheaper long-term play. Unlimited simultaneous connections (vs CyberGhost 7), lower promo pricing on the 24-month plan, fewer dedicated streaming labels. Best when device count matters more than server labels.
• Private Internet Access - the largest server fleet. PIA publishes proof-of-server-count and runs more US state-level locations than CyberGhost, useful for US sports blackout workarounds. Owned by the same Kape Technologies parent.